They’re gone! After outcry, Time Warner uncaps the tubes

After a public outcry and the attention of several members of Congress, Time …

Time Warner Cable said repeatedly that it wanted to hear from the public as it expanded its Internet data caps, and the public has roared back its response: metered billing should exist in some non-obscene ratio to cost and to competitors' pricing. In response, TWC will shelve the trials "while the customer education process continues."

The plan to expand the test into North Carolina and New York survived in public for two weeks, and not even TWC's decision to dramatically boost the caps a week into the fracas could stop the anger. Not that the company believes anything about the plan was fundamentally misguided; as CEO Glenn Britt put it today, "There is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing."

Schumer announced his own opposition to the plan, then spoke with Britt about the "overwhelming opposition" to the caps. Citizens of Rochester, New York were furious about the caps about to be imposed on them, with Schumer's office describing the reaction as "outrage." The company relented.

Massa and Schumer were thrilled with the decision to cancel the trial program. "We're delighted that commonsense prevailed," said Massa today. "The people of Western New York spoke and I heard them loud and clear. Together we have won and I am glad that I was able to play a small part in bringing about this change. This is a true grassroots victory, but we will move forward with our legislation to ensure that any future plans to charge customers based on how much they download do not spring up anywhere else."

Massa's legislation may stand little chance of success on its own, but Schumer's office says that the senator will continue keeping an eye on the issue of caps, too, in order to make sure that "any future changes in Internet pricing are in line with what the community wants and needs." Translation: we have our eye on you.

Glenn Britt rather diplomatically noted that TWC "look[s] forward to continuing to work with Senator Schumer, our customers and all of the other interested parties as the process moves forward."

Textbook overreach

The whole fiasco looks like a textbook example of overreach. Even groups like Free Press accept metered billing as a fair system (so long as the connection remains "neutral"), so all the American ISPs had to do in order to reframe user expectations was roll out a pricing structure that wouldn't utterly outrage the public.

(Hint: when Comcast currently offers a 250GB/month cap for around $42.95, and the price of Internet backbone traffic is dropping by 50 percent a year, and DOCSIS 3.0 updates cost only $20-$100 per customer, and TWC's finances showed big upticks in broadband revenue even as costs plunged—well, selling a 100GB/month cap for $75 was hardly going to go down well, especially when your industry is one of the least-popular in the US.)

So, failing in that simple mission, TWC may have just scotched other interesting experiments in metered billing being done by big ISPs, who can't be at all thrilled by the way that TWC handled the situation. In addition to backing away from its own caps, Congress will now consider a bill on the subject, Chuck Schumer will keep an eye on ISPs, and metered billing is now associated with "price gouging" in the public mind.

As for Beaumont, Texas, the town with the dubious honor of being capped by both AT&T and TWC, the long nightmare may soon be over.

Free Press had already rallied its troops to petition Congress over the matter, and campaign director Timothy Karr was enthusiastic about TWC's decision. "We're glad to see Time Warner Cable's price-gouging scheme collapse in the face of consumer opposition," he said. "Let this be a lesson to other Internet service providers looking to head down a similar path. Consumers are not going to stand idly by as companies try to squeeze them off the Internet. This is a major victory, but the fight for a fast, open and affordable Internet is far from over."

Kyle McSlarrow, who heads the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, insists that TWC did everything right, and he thanks them for being open and transparent throughout the process.

"None of us knows with certainty what works best for consumers," he noted today in a blog post. "As broadband providers, we face daunting and ever-changing challenges in ensuring that we do our level best to provide consumers with what they want, when they want it. But our goal has been, is, and will be to communicate with our customers in an open and transparent manner; to try new models that can be used to attract new broadband users and more equitably spread costs among high and low volume users, and—at the end of the day—to let the consumer make the ultimate choice of whether new models survive and thrive or are thrown into the dustbin of history."

Well, consumers have spoken, and they're giving the cable industry a hand hoisting that dustbin lid.

I would rather have the cap at 100 GB / month, that way low usage in one week can be rolled over to higher usage the next, but it wasn't that big of a deal. Buying additional bandwidth was really expensive, $5/GB, and you could only buy 3 GB / week. Once you were over your allocation, you were dropped down to 768 kbps / 384 kbps or something real slow like that. Negative balances carried forward to the next week, but its hard to rack up much of a negative balance at those speeds.

I think the key to making it work is to have 1) very high speeds and 2) those speeds are constant, or very nearly so, across the different usage caps. That way, plans are differentiated by usage caps alone.

What I still don't understand is why companies like TWC spend money trying to limit the end user? Why not take that money they were using for testing, and put it to expanding/speeding up their own infrastructure?

It's sad for us Canadians that Americans were able to find a 100GB/month cap outrageous and get it overturned while Rogers has had a 60GB/month cap for a while now. Maybe Senator Schumer can drop by for a cross-border visit.

"This is a true grassroots victory, but we will move forward with our legislation to ensure that any future plans to charge customers based on how much they download do not spring up anywhere else."

Nice win for the consumer but everything worked properly in this case. There is no need for another law to be written to cover this situation. The government knee jerk reaction is just as overreaching as TWCs caps were. Implement competition instead of regulation.

If its a real victory then they should be stopping the trials in Beaumont as well. If they continue on in Beaumont, then you know it'll just be a matter of time before they introduce them back again. And the tools they are providing to track your usage, I'm curious if these tools send them info on how much your using? If they do stop the trials in Beaumont the next question will be, do the people there get a refund of anything they paid in overages?

Originally posted by ltcommander.data:It's sad for us Canadians that Americans were able to find a 100GB/month cap outrageous and get it overturned while Rogers has had a 60GB/month cap for a while now. Maybe Senator Schumer can drop by for a cross-border visit.

I don't think a 100 GB/month cap was outrageous. It was outrageous charging $75 for it when Comcast set the president of 250 GB for basic service at $43. For say, $30, a 100 GB cap would not be outrageous.

60GB a month isn't bad for say, $20 CAD a month (figure $43 US is about $50 CAD). Perhaps regulation is different in Canada so maybe $25-$30 CAD would be reasonable. Beyond that, I think changes to Canadian system of Internet Price-Fixing should be made.

Excuse me while I choke on my breakfast down here in New Zealand, where caps range from 1Gb to a massive 20Gb ("For the heaviest users!") with one of our largest ISPs. Go over your cap and you're dropped to 64kb speed for the rest of the month. 20Gb is the highest cap available. You can double it in any one month for another $10, but that's it.

"None of us knows with certainty what works best for consumers," noted Kyle McSlarrow, who heads the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, "but we strongly suspected it would be crippling prices."

Originally posted by David Bradbury:I can only hope that we're as successful here in Canada. Bell is about to cap every DSL line at 60 GB nationwide.

I came to post the same thing. I used to work as an art director producing a magazine for Bell's satellite TV and it became clear how little regard they have for their customers after they shut down the mag down and gave subscribers nothing in its place. They can shit all they like on their customers because most (many in rural areas) don't have any choice but Bell. They really have an incredible amount of disdain for their customers' needs.

As others have mentioned, caps per se aren't a bad thing. If the caps are reasonable for the speed provided and the price charged, I say go ahead and cap us, so long as any overage is proportional. If I pay $44.95 for a 250GB cap from comcast, that's about $0.17/GB. So charging $0.25/GB or even double the monthly fee at $0.34/GB (after repeat overage) is reasonable. After all, there can reasonably be SOME penalty for going over cap. Anything more than double the per GB rate though is utterly ridiculous, unless we're talking about people with 400-500 GB overages. After all, moving over half a terabyte in a month is pretty impressive.

Also, random question. These caps: downloads only, or sum of down + up? I've never seen a straight answer on this particular question, and I can't find anyone at comcast who can say for sure.

Originally posted by elemnt14:What I still don't understand is why companies like TWC spend money trying to limit the end user? Why not take that money they were using for testing, and put it to expanding/speeding up their own infrastructure?

I hate to have to tell you this, but most companies don't care about the consumer. It's all about the bottom line. Decrease costs as much as you can (meaning no infrastructure upgrades/expansion) while you increase revenue as much as you can (use your monopoly status to charge as much money for as little service as you can).

quote:

Originally posted by Seer:I think the key to making it work is to have 1) very high speeds and 2) those speeds are constant, or very nearly so, across the different usage caps. That way, plans are differentiated by usage caps alone.

I wouldn't mind metered internet (similar to how we pay for electricity, water, etc). The problem is the hard bandwidth caps and ridiculous price gouging. I don't want my internet service slowed down if I go over a cap. Just charge me more for using more bandwidth. Likewise, if the system changes from unlimited bandwidth to metered bandwidth, I shouldn't be charged any more than I'm paying right now (about $60 for a 10mbit down / 1mbit up cable connection). The problem with the system TWC was proposing was that it would have been much more expensive for most users.

The bigger issue here, and rationale behind the caps, is that internet providers which offer television service (cable companies) are starting to have to compete with online streaming video services, such as Hulu and YouTube, and P2P video, which tend to take up the majority of user's bandwidth. If users have to start paying per gigabyte, they might pay more attention to what they download or watch via the internet and cut back, especially in this economy.

IF an ISP wants to "meter" end-user billing, there's a simple way to do it that requires no actual metering. Calculate the maximum possible download per month at each speed that's offered; so, for example, if there's a 3Mbps download speed, the "cap" is 50 MB. That's a 3 Mbps download 24/7 for 21 days. Now charge accordingly for that speed tier, and *never mention any caps* because you don't have to; they're built into the speed limitation.

TWC handled this whole thing in a totally ham-fisted manner which demonstrated their overwhelming greed, and their monopoly mentality: "You'll pay what we demand because you have no choice, suckers!" Apparently they have already forgotten the lesson of AIG: Huge greed generates huge outrage.

Using bandwidth caps to try to protect their cable TV monopoly was amazingly stupid.

Bandwidth costs SOME money, but not that much. I think the only thing that should happen is if say a user goes over 100GB they could charged an extra $5-$10 total and that's it. I use somewhere between 100-300GB a month and pay an extra $10 a month for higher speed internet already.

It becomes obvious how little bandwidth costs when you look at the cost of unlimited downloads from some usenet providers. I've seen good usenet service offered as low as $11 per month for unlimited downloads, and you could pull well over 100GB a month doing that.

For starters, I live in Beaumont and I have had TWC internet service for over 2 months now. Switched from AT&T DSL... the only two games in town.

Unfortunately, I have no solid usage numbers to share with you all, but I can tell you that I download and upload a TON and use up quite a bit of bandwidth. I have an old spare Dell poweredge server I use as a media storage/torrent box and it has been on constantly since I have had TWC. I alos download the occasional Netflix movie with my Xbox.

Not once have i received a notice from them. My bill has not gone up. And all in all, I am quite satisfied with their service (except when they switched out my TV reciever box and my cable modem was unbound from my account by accident... that was pretty fail).

Whatever cap they were testing did not seem to effect me one way or another.

Originally posted by TheFerenc:Anything more than double the per GB rate though is utterly ridiculous, unless we're talking about people with 400-500 GB overages. After all, moving over half a terabyte in a month is pretty impressive.

Also, random question. These caps: downloads only, or sum of down + up? I've never seen a straight answer on this particular question, and I can't find anyone at comcast who can say for sure.

As for moving half a terabyte in a month, that's about what I average according to my router on my business Comcast service. But that's combined up and down.

And as I understand, the caps they are all doing is combined, up and down, traffic.

Originally posted by Kressilac:Implement competition instead of regulation.

I'm sure the credible threat of regulation had more to do with this than customer outcry. If they cared what their customers thought, they wouldn't keep raising TV charges at several times the rate of inflation.

Competition won't work where there is isn't any. I'm in the 16th-largest metro area in the U.S., and all I've got is Comcast and Qwest for consumer broadband. Qwest hasn't updated their infrastructure since Lily Tomlin's days as an operator, so my maximum possible speed there is 1.5 Mbps for $39 a month, uncapped. Comcast is about $55 a month for 12-15 Mbps with a 250 GB cap. I doubt they're feeling much in the way of competition from Qwest.

How exactly would you implement competition in my market? I'd love to have choices.

I think some of the people here either work for TWC or Comcrap or are smoking some serious kind bud. Why would we let any type of metering come into play at this late stage of the game? I think all of you that say metering is ok need to have your freakin head examined! If we metered from the very beginning of the "Internet", we wouldn't have all the rich media options we have now. We would have a bunch of text and some small gif files.

Let's be real. The only reason that caps came into being is because of people like myself that dumped basic analog cable TV ($55.00 a month) for Netflix and Hulu like services. These services wouldn't exist if the TWC's of the country would have capped the Ineternets from the beginning. They know that they make a shit load of money off of ad supported TV.

This was all setup with that idiot Martin. From the beginning of the Comast blocking fiascal, Comcrap and Martin knew that this was the way to get caps implemented. It looked like Martin was slapping Comcraps hands for blocking P@P activity. Comcrap comes back and says fine, if we can't discriminate, we will invoke transfer caps. Of course people thought "great, at least we can use are P2P software now". While the whole time Comcrap and TWC were in cahoots with Martin and the neocons on the FCC board all along. They knew that they just couldn't come out with caps for the hell of it. As we have just seen with the outrage at TWC caps, comcrap would have had the same backlash. Now Comcrap and the gang can have their TV revenue gaurding caps and we the consumer once again take it in the shorts.

The cable companies don't want to be a "dumb pipe" to the internet. Why? They were more than happy to be the pipe before people could get TV and movies streamed to their PC's. Now that you can pretty much find and watch anything your heart desires, they come in and say "my god, people are using to much bandwidth and slowing it down for everyone". I say BULLSHIT! There has always been plenty of bandwidth. 15 years ago the country was using less than 30% of available bandwidth and it hasn't changed much since that time. It's real simple, as soon as people start using a service that was essentially free, comapnies come in and try to monetize the hell out of it. It boils down to corporate greed and special interest writting our lands laws. We need to take back our country from the corporate assholes or we won't survive.

So how can we find some. It's really pretty simple. Instead of capping people who are paying for the service, how about putting a stop to email spam. It accounts for more email bandwidth than email itself. While your at it, outlaw banner ads and advertising that is a much more bandwidth than the page content. After all I'm already paying monthly for my bandwidth. Why should we pay for a company's marketing bandwidth.

Business shouldn't be able to have it both ways. Either gives us free internet bandwidth or charge us a monthly fee advertisement free. Why do I have to pay for both types of bandwidth. When paid cable TV first came out, it was billed commercial free TV so that we wouldn't revolt.

We let the commercials creep in slow and passively. Now it's almost all commercials, we even have too endure the advertising watermarks during the show, and we're paying through the nose for our apathy. Don't allow it to happen all over again on the Internet. There is already too much darn ads now. I say cap them not us.

I for one am very concerned about the willingness to pay for caps like cellphone usage. I agree that some restriction is inevitable , but the internet is flourishing in the video area , and this could stifle innovation if not done sensibly.

BTW, a 50 GB cap can be exceeded in less than 2 days at 3M bits/sec (384k bytes/sec) not 21 days. 2 to 2.5 gigs or more for 1 movie on hulu or amazon is not unreasonable.

In other news, Time Warner Cable sues the city of Beaumont, TX for failing to be a successful guinea pig.

Side note, ljocampo, I like the way you think. Never really thought of it like that. I'm paying for bandwidth as it is. I don't want to pay for advertisements, even though web-sites force them onto me to "pay their bills". If telco's gonna cap my bandwidth, then they need to pre-sift all the advert crap out of my bandwidth at their server so I never have to see it or have it go against my bandwidth cap.

There we go. If TWC REALLY wants to offer a good service, they can charge folks $5/month extra for ad-free bandwidth; they pre-filter all of the ads, junk flash, etc crap out of your end-user content before you even see it. It saves bandwidth, it gets to you faster (since less crap to pipe over the line to you), and you don't have to run things like Ad-Blocker Plus to do so on your end.

Why don't they put this packet-sniffing bullshit to REAL use for a change?

Originally posted by ltcommander.data:It's sad for us Canadians that Americans were able to find a 100GB/month cap outrageous and get it overturned while Rogers has had a 60GB/month cap for a while now. Maybe Senator Schumer can drop by for a cross-border visit.

I don't think a 100 GB/month cap was outrageous. It was outrageous charging $75 for it when Comcast set the president of 250 GB for basic service at $43. For say, $30, a 100 GB cap would not be outrageous.

60GB a month isn't bad for say, $20 CAD a month (figure $43 US is about $50 CAD). Perhaps regulation is different in Canada so maybe $25-$30 CAD would be reasonable. Beyond that, I think changes to Canadian system of Internet Price-Fixing should be made.

There we go. If TWC REALLY wants to offer a good service, they can charge folks $5/month extra for ad-free bandwidth; they pre-filter all of the ads, junk flash, etc crap out of your end-user content before you even see it. It saves bandwidth, it gets to you faster (since less crap to pipe over the line to you), and you don't have to run things like Ad-Blocker Plus to do so on your end.

Why don't they put this packet-sniffing bullshit to REAL use for a change?

This comment was edited by Tundro Walker on April 16, 2009 22:18

So... I can pay them to filter my content because their bandwidth caps are completely unrealistic? That doesn't sound like a very good idea at all, even if the filters were perfect (which is competely unrealistic). You need to re-evaluate what you should expect and demand from internet providers, or you're going to be in bad shape.

Guys, the point here is that if metering is done correctly, the average consumer shouldn't have to worry about huge price increases, data caps, and especially not filtering. And by "average consumer," I don't mean people who check their email a few times a day - the plans need to account for the growth of online media, and the fact that the TRUE "average consumer" will be consuming more and more of this data in the very near future. These companies DO need to change their business models, but they definitely DON'T need to grind customers into the dirt with horrible implementations like TWC.

Originally posted by Netguru:Why? They were more than happy to be the pipe before people could get TV and movies streamed to their PC's. Now that you can pretty much find and watch anything your heart desires, they come in and say "my god, people are using to much bandwidth and slowing it down for everyone". I say BULLSHIT

I think most of the populace, both here in Canada and the U.S., are aware of this..people are finally catching on as to WHY they want to caps us. It is about controlling/curtailing freedom. I dont even watch TV anymore. I got so sick to f'ing death of EVERY.F'ING.CHANNEL being either an infomercial or a reality show. With the net, I can easily watch what I want to watch without paying 70 bucks a month. Usenet, YouTube, P2P, whatever. And Im happy.

I think the entire "metering" process would be expensive and contentious, and add an obvious overhead to the cost of doing business--an overhead I haven't heard anyone on either side of the argument talk about.

I mean, suppose your broadband company says that you "downloaded such and such on such and such a date" but your records indicate that you did not. What then? Seems to me the whole notion is riddled with administrative flaws and vulnerabilities that would turn all of it quickly into a nightmare.

I hate to say it but I have to: we didn't hear about plans like this in the US before people started talking about "'net neutrality" and other things relating to increased governmental oversight and regulation.

In the US, before all of this talk about fictional scenarios (kind of like all the talk today about "global warming" is going to cost us all dearly before it's over), we had it right with no caps and universal pricing. Everything done since is a giant step backwards, imo.

Good riddance to these prohibitive and costly concepts--good riddance to TWC's caps and pricing tiers. May we never see their like again.

(Hint: when Comcast currently offers a 250GB/month cap for around $42.95, and the price of Internet backbone traffic is dropping by 50 percent a year, and DOCSIS 3.0 updates cost only $20-$100 per customer, and TWC's finances showed big upticks in broadband revenue even as costs plunged—well, selling a 100GB/month cap for $75 was hardly going to go down well, especially when your industry is one of the least-popular in the US.)

Not on topic at all but golly isn't there a limit to using "and" in one sentence? I believe you have enough there for sentence one and two.

Originally posted by WaltC:I hate to say it but I have to: we didn't hear about plans like this in the US before people started talking about "'net neutrality" and other things relating to increased governmental oversight and regulation.

Correlation !-> Causation!!If anything, the net neutrality question has prevented them from trying anything like this up until now. My theory is that everyone in charge at TWC suffered a simultaneous concussion, and this is the result.

quote:

Originally posted by WaltC:Good riddance to these prohibitive and costly concepts--good riddance to TWC's caps and pricing tiers. May we never see their like again.

I would rather have the cap at 100 GB / month, that way low usage in one week can be rolled over to higher usage the next, but it wasn't that big of a deal. Buying additional bandwidth was really expensive, $5/GB, and you could only buy 3 GB / week. Once you were over your allocation, you were dropped down to 768 kbps / 384 kbps or something real slow like that. Negative balances carried forward to the next week, but its hard to rack up much of a negative balance at those speeds.

I think the key to making it work is to have 1) very high speeds and 2) those speeds are constant, or very nearly so, across the different usage caps. That way, plans are differentiated by usage caps alone.

You're not even reading, are you? They want to introduce higher price for less service. Why are you bent on "making this work" for them when they're insanely profitable already and just trying to get more money out of people and protect their other businesses?

I pay $10/month for internet and Cable TV here in Korea. For that I get 8 Megabyte per second downloads and unlimited transfer. No ISP here is giving me shit or going broke over my usage.

I'm not sure they are insanely profitable, but apparently they've realized that people know they don't need to pay that much for bandwidth and where willing to go to other alternatives to get away from cable with caps.

Originally posted by Kressilac:Nice win for the consumer but everything worked properly in this case. There is no need for another law to be written to cover this situation. The government knee jerk reaction is just as overreaching as TWCs caps were. Implement competition instead of regulation.

Once the government has granted a monopoly to the likes of TW & Comcast, they have to regulate it, else they're complicit in the screwing of customers. They have no incentive to encourage competition here.